POLL: Saturday Night Live Audience Getting Bored With Trump Bashing

A poll released by Morning Consult today was paired with the headline “Audiences Want Saturday Night Live to Keep Ribbing Trump”, but a closer look at the numbers reveal the headline to be deceptive, and in actuality the opposite turns out to be true.

Morning Consult’s survey starts by asking respondents if they enjoy SNL’s skits impersonating Donald Trump, which are always a very negative portrayal of the president, and if they would like to see more of these parodies.

The Morning Consult states that 33% of respondents said they enjoyed SNL’s Trump skits, compared to 16% who said they did not enjoy them and would like to see them move on, along with 19% who said that although they enjoyed them, they still want SNL to focus on something else.

If you add up the 16% and 19% of respondents who agree that they’d like to see SNL move on, it totals 35% who want SNL to move on from their Trump parodies versus 33% who want to continue seeing more of them. The remaining percentage of respondents had “no opinion” or “don’t know” regarding the matter.

But a plurality of viewers don’t agree with that sentiment, according to a recent Morning Consult survey. Thirty-three percent of people said they enjoy SNL’s impressions of members of the Trump administration and want to see more of them, compared with 16 percent who said they have not found the impressions entertaining and want to see something else. Perhaps feeling politically fatigued, 19 percent of people said that while they enjoyed the Trump-themed sketches, they now want “Saturday Night Live” to focus on something else.

Enjoying something does not necessarily correlate to wanting to see more of it, as the old Shakesperean quote goes, “Too much of a good thing” can actually be a bad thing. Although viewers might have found the Trump skits funny at first, they may now consider them to be worn out or have become bored with the constant Trump bashing, and wish SNL would revise their focus. For example, I personally found some of SNL’s Trump skits funny from a comedy standpoint, but at this point I believe they have taken it too far into the realm of bashing and personally insulting the president.

Another interesting result of Morning Consult’s poll is the percentage of respondents who voted for Hillary Clinton that enjoy and want to see more Trump skits from SNL. The result came in at 57% of Clinton voters want to see more, yet you would imagine that the vast majority of those who voted for Hillary Clinton would be avid in their support of anything mocking Donald Trump. However, 57% is only a slim majority.

Albeit unsurprising, poll results show people who voted for Hillary Clinton last year have not had their fill of “Saturday Night Live”writing sketches that highlight the Trump administration’s foibles. Fifty-seven percent said they’ve enjoyed such sketches and want to see more. Just 14 percent of people who voted for Trump in 2016 said the same.

Clinton voters are also tuning in routinely to “Saturday Night Live”: 48 percent of people said they at least watch the show sometimes. Forty-seven percent of people aged 30-44 said the same, while 45 percent of Trump voters said they never watch it, similar to 51 percent of people aged 65 or older.

Although the Morning Consult article states that Clinton voters are “routinely” watching Saturday Night Live, only 48% said they watch the show “sometimes”, meaning they are not regular viewers despite them using the word “routinely”.

The end result of Morning Consult’s article is a portrayal of how deceptive headlines can morph the results of a poll to fit a certain narrative, attempting to show that voters are just going wild over SNL’s Trump related skits and can’t get enough of them, but when you dig deeper into the numbers they paint quite a different picture.

As with the biased polls during the election that got it so wrong as to their
predictions of the outcome, this Morning Consult article uses deceptive
headlines and descriptions to twist the narrative in attempts to make the viewer
think the majority of people dislike President Trump.